A writer affiliated with a pro-Israel policy center has written a piece in The Washington Post arguing that while Orange telecom recently threatened to boycott Israel over its settlement policy in the occupied West Bank, the company is actually doing business in the occupied territory of Nagorno Karabakh.

What seems to have ruffled writer Eugene Kontorovichs’s feathers is last week’s announcement by Orange CEO Stephane Richard that his company was going to “drop” its business with Israel – apparently in response to Arab boycott calls.

Kontorovich in the June 11 issue of The Washington Post paints Orange Telecom as duplicitous since the company, in the writer’s words, “actively does business with, and promotes, settlements in occupied territory.”

Kontorovich is here referring to Nagorno-Karabakh, which he describes as “an area of Azerbaijan that has been occupied by Armenia since seizing it in a bloody 1992-94 war.”

Eugene Kontorovich is affiliated with the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Jerusalem based policy center, which describes its mission as:

 “To secure the future of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish People, to strengthen Israeli democracy, expand individual liberty, and deepen free market principles in Israel.”

Kontorovich’s contention is that while Richard, on the one hand, was ready to cut ties with Tel Aviv after Orange was severely criticized in France and Egypt for providing services in areas acknowledged by the United Nations as occupied by Israel, his company directly and openly operates in Nagorno –Karabakh, a territory which the U.N. and the E.U. consider occupied. 

Orange, in which the French government owns a 25% stake, said it would be dropping is business with Israel last week.

CEO Richard then traveled to Israel on June 11 for a two day visit, apologizing for the boycott reference.

Kontorovich, in his article, argues that Orange, and by extension the French government,” is committing what a senior French official just described as a war crime.” 

The senior French official referred to is French Ambassador to the US Gerard Araud who posted on Twitter that “Contributing to settlements in an occupied territory is illegal”.

Read Kontorovich’s full article Here

(Prof. Eugene Kontorovich teaches at Northwestern University School of Law, and is currently a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at Hebrew University)